I was going to post a new diatribe about iTunes but WordPress/Jetpack security went beyond expectations in denying me access then corrupting my iPad install, and finally blocking every attempt to get back in until I changed my password. Even then all I get is the bare bones, so until I get that sorted you’ll just have to anticipate the post.
Author: Pete (Page 1 of 2)
Electronic highway robbery : your money or your life!
When is consent freely given? Is the recent trend towards forced consent for access or face punitive subscription costs really fair and even legal?
Facebook is the most obvious example, but one of my weather apps is now following the same path. They want to use my info (not always clearly defined in scope or intent), or my agreement to a higher than comfortable monthly subscription, with an obvious pressure to agree to the former.
I don’t object to shotgun advertising (in moderation, not every other post) because I can simply ignore it. If it gets annoying I will block the advertiser, but I understand that some income is necessary to keep the services going. But my personal info, including location, interests and contacts, is just that: personal, not for public consumption. So my initial response is to deny everything and just stop using the service.
What is my value to Meta? Perhaps we should divide the turnover by the number of subscribers:?
2022 annual revenue was 116 billion, made from 3 billion monthly active users (MAU). Daily active users number around 2 billion. But most revenue comes from the US – nearly 50% of the income being generated by less than 10% of the user base. Note that the monthly charge does not apply to US users, being EU limited, maybe 15% of the user base.
Just going with the crude numbers, the 400 million EU user accounts for around 20% of the revenue, say 25 billion. So each user is responsible for just over $60 per annum, that works out to say $5 per month. Ok, that’s higher than I had originally imagined, but still only half of the demand for ad-free access. Again, I remind you that I can accept adverts, but not the use of my personal information, so this is really a double insult.
Facebook cookie consent, give us your personal info or we want a tenner a month for an ad free subscription (and we will probably resell your info anyway)
Been here four years now, so although I am not as long term as many I also have the advantage of relatively recent experience of UK service. It is constantly surprising just how difficult it is to actually get anyone to provide support, service, answers, or even just acknowledgement for anything.
Just recently a large car dealership has lost a new car sale because a relatively senior manager has failed to answer a yes/no question that didn’t require research or consultation. I didn’t even get any response at all to my message. If that’s pre-sales support then I have no hope to get help after paying my money.
This isn’t an isolated incident, it’s a repeated behaviour that I have seen from large, medium, and small businesses, and also from individuals. Right now it’s a very pleasant surprise to get an answer or support of any sort, and if it’s a positive one then it’s even more uplifting. That shouldn’t be the case.
Is it a matter of fear of consequences, a feeling that it’s a problem for someone else, or just simply laziness?
Just so no-one accuses me of bias against Spain, I would add that some of my worst experiences are at the hands of British-owned organisations. Being ghosted when you have a serious issue will not generate any urge to support a business, and I have been known to dissuade others from purchasing from these companies.
My approach to providing support in my work meant taking ownership for people: we made sure that issues were followed up one way or another. Even if it meant saying something couldn’t be done we had to take that step and sometimes disappoint people. However, they generally accepted that we were honest and acting in their interests. Ignoring them would have not worked to ensure a long term relationship – that’s something that several individuals here are learning.
So it gives me great pleasure to be able to thank one salesperson who took it upon themselves to research an issue for me, not just accepting a negative response from their own normal sources, and coming up with a successful answer that we can both work with. I won’t name names here (any more than the failures) but gratz to the Peugeot dealership in Bellregard…
What is it with social media? It all starts so nicely, providing a platform to permit at least relatively free discourse, often for little or no charge. Funds are raised usually through advertising, and mostly people accept that they (or more correctly, information about them) are the product being sold to pay for the service.
All goes well for a while, a reasonable balance is obtained. Then something changes: maybe it’s greed, maybe a desire to control the narrative, and the disconnect between site owners and users comes into sharper focus.
In very recent memory Twitter was the obvious example: a system that had become ubiquitous, providing a quick and effective way of communicating between two parties, be that for personal or commercial use. Then a self-obsessed narcissist (is there any other kind) bought it out and proceeded to try and divert it to his own interests while also attempting to recoup his costs resulting from the purchase. His agenda succeeded in screwing the system up for everyone, driving both monetary value and utility down. Ok, it’s not dead yet, but it has suffered a significant drop in usefulness, at least in part from the loss of worthwhile input.
We’ve seen similar, if not as obviously self destructive, issues with other social media giants: Facebook and Flickr to name just two, the former lost trust, the latter value, as both tried to control what people could say or do.
Now Reddit: with an imminent IPO the management team obviously want to raise value. So what do they do? Alienate a significant group of people, content creators and subreddit moderators, by trying to force a ridiculous and clearly punitive rate for API access on third party app developers. These apps provide functionality that the native Reddit app lacks, very obviously, but often do so while also blocking adverts. This is viewed as one of their great advantages by the users, but as anathema by Reddit admins, as advertising provides income for the site. So in a clear and deliberate step Reddit gave an ultimatum to the third part app developers: you will pay us a punitive sum, and you will do it with only a month’s notice.
To be fair, most developers accept the need for API payments, but not at the inflated rates Reddit wants to charge, an order of magnitude more than the actual costs and lost profit to the company. Many would try and comply with a reasonable subscription model – but not with only a few weeks notice, it’s just impossible to retool and cover costs in the meantime.
This has played out badly for Reddit: in a rapidly developing spat between one the major 3PA developers and the CEO of Reddit, the latter accused the developer of threatening Reddit with blackmail. Unfortunately the dev had kept a (perfectly legal) tape of the conversations, something that disproved the allegations clearly. Not content though, the CEO doubled down on his story in a public AMA session – to be immediately challenged by the dev to back up his claims. The result was as might have been expected, dead silence from Reddit and an outcry from the people who had witnessed the disagreement.
The CEO has a history of editing others’ comments to make himself look good, displaying a megalomaniac tendency not unlike Elon Musk, and the AMA seems to have been an attempt to whitewash over the issue. However it has backfired spectacularly, the whole thing being a public shaming of his attitude and behaviour that won’t go unmissed by investors in any upcoming IPO. An opportunity to enhance the organisation’s value has turned into an indictment of the management’s ability and driven a significant wedge between the groups.
Undoubtably Reddit will survive this, as Twitter and many other mismanaged groups have done, but at the cost of driving users towards a more decentralised and open concept, something designed to avoid the sort of imposed control. So far the fediverse (don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with the name) hasn’t gained much public traction, but at some point in their history neither had the current social media giants. Just keep an eye open for Mastodon and Lenny, their or their successors’ time will come. Anyone remember MySpace or Digg? The same thing can and will happen to Twitter and Reddit as freer alternatives build up support and the old guard entrenches itself ever further in the pursuit of profit at the expense of service.
In order to be completely fair, I have to grant (with some reservations) that Google eventually did the right thing, and reversed their blanket decision to drop the Legacy accounts. As it stands, Legacy accounts intended for personal use remain free from monthly fees. This was a sort of last minute decision, not published particularly transparently, and comes with some caveats.
The first restriction, and it’s something that I think many if not all personal users will accept, is that the accounts must only be for personal use. I know this will affect any number of small (and some not so small) businesses that have relied on the accounts for maybe ten or more years, but there’s an understandable rationale to charge for a service used in the chase for profit. How many of these businesses offer their own services for free? Yes, it will impact on some small, one or two-man, close to the edge, operations, but Google have effectively supported many larger organisations for years and have chosen to draw a mainly clear and inarguable line. Personal use – free, non-personal – you pay.
The second concern is a little less straightforward. Google have said they may withdraw some ‘business’ functionality, without clarifying what they mean by that. If you are at all paranoid (like me) then you start looking at the custom domain email service. Google would like nothing more than to have everyone using a gmail address, and there’s still the possibility that they’ll introduce a charge to retain the custom email domain later. We will face that when it happens, but to me this still smacks of a foot in the door towards making the Legacy accounts unviable.
In typical Google fashion the entire reversal remains fraught with problems. For many people the actual process to confirm their personal use failed (and seems to still be doing so – with many reporting that this option is no longer available now). They’ve also made a hash of reverting accounts for people who had, due to the pressure applied beforehand, already updated to a paid option. That should, in theory, be easy to fix, but no, there’s confusion over whether or not some accounts are free or whether they will be charged going forward. Then there’s the whole question of those who migrated, at financial and time cost, to other services. I think Google can forget tempting them back, given that there is no way of compensating for the effort wasted – but then perhaps Google prefers not to have to provide the free service any longer, and are looking to as future where they can say that demand has dropped and the provision is no longer needed…
AKA G Suite, AKA Workspaces – I refuse to accept that name changes have effectively altered (or killed) the original system.
Introduced around 2006, the GAFYD package offered access to Gmail facilities using a custom domain, and proved immediately popular with technophiles looking to provide a simple, recognisable, home for family and small business operations, mainly for email. Over time that use morphed into further areas – including purchases from YouTube, storage etc.
At the time, the clear statement was that this provision would be free forever ‘as long as the service continues to exist‘ or words to that effect – with hindsight we can see how meaningless that was, as obviously once the free service is discontinued that statement becomes self-fulfilling.
Google stopped accepting new free accounts back in 2012 or so, but permitted existing ones to continue, even as the name (but not promoted purpose) changed first to GSuite, then latterly to Workspaces, with new service provisions (and existing limitations – tried integrating with Google Home recently?), but retaining the core of a custom domain serving a gmail backend.
The bombshell at the start of this year was that the free accounts would now need to be migrated to paid Workspace ones within a few months. There was no discussion, no consideration of those who have invested time and effort in developing a family brand and purchasing further services from Google based on the original package. Costs are surprisingly high – $6 per user per month, so for a family of say five individuals, that’s $360 per year for absolutely nothing more than they had before, and for many that includes business services that they never asked for or will ever use.
Crumbs were thrown eventually, a possible migration to a free account of some sort which notably does not include custom domain based email, but only the barest fractured effort was made to communicate with customers. Timescales and alternatives were confused, but at no point did anyone from Google (a faceless organisation at the best of times) attempt to listen to the affected groups.
At no time has anyone from Google even addressed the possibility of a Families Workspace sort of arrangement, for a minimal cost of say $1 or $2/user/month, which would give the above family of five an annual bill of $60 to $120, much more in line with other family-based services now available. This would not necessarily include the more business orientated application, but retain the core email with a custom domain. Don’t forget that Google already have this capability (in use since 2006), so there’s zero cost to develop it, it just provides an option that many customers have said would be acceptable – but not for Google.
Many threw the towel in quickly, and migrated to other services: the longstanding Microsoft 365 package proved attractive, and Apple’s relatively new iCloud+ support of custom domains for email was quoted as an effective alternative (Google’s abandonment of their clientele was most surprising given that this was a new package announce less than 12 months ago – commercial suicide?). Others waited on Google’s hints of an alternative, for families with less than 10 users, supported by an obviously meaningless questionnaire – if they didn’t already know their userbase, and the likely effect of the announcement, then they weren’t going to get any good news from the underpublicised and almost hidden web page. That alternative is still not clarified or even defined beyond a non-existent waitlist, other than an unambiguous statement that it would not include any gmail functionality, let alone with custom domains.
So there you have it – a large, somewhat inaccessible, corporation breaks a clear promise, made to technically adept influencers, and expects everyone to just fall in with their plans. The end users are faced with having to migrate more than a decade of history to a new environment, face possible monetary losses, deal with families uprooted from longstanding email experiences, and all this without any help from the organisation responsible for the chaos.
Google – you’ve obviously forgotten that mantra: “Don’t be evil“.
Yet another rant about cookie use on websites! Any site that uses an ‘accept all’ or default accept for cookies should also have an equally visible and accessible ‘reject all’ button. No discussion!
Those of us who signed up for a free Google Apps account back in 2006 or thereabouts just got hit with a sledgehammer from the organisation – pay up by July or lose your data. Although signing up for the free option was dropped in 2012 many IT-savvy people had set up family groups with custom domains by that point and have relied on the service since then. The short notice and possible relatively high cost (6€ per user per month) for the transition hasn’t gone down at all well, and remember that’s with a by now possibly influential group of people.
When originally offered there was a statement that the service would continue to be free, but with the proviso that would only apply as long as Google continued to offer the service. I’m assuming there’s been sufficient change here to make dropping it legal, so I’ll let others argue that point. Suffice it to say that I still think this is a bit of an underhand move to save probably very little actual operational costs, and something that won’t generate enough revenue to recover the bad feeling engendered by the move.
Disclaimer – I’m one of those hit by the announcement, and I’m not particularly overjoyed with it. Although not amongst the worst-hit (those who have used the accounts to purchase apps or media, or use the Google account to authenticate sign-ins elsewhere are really going to feel the pain) I either need to pony up for multiple accounts or find somewhere to migrate everything to.
That’s a lot of email, all nicely sorted and labelled, that’s going to have to move, unless the behemoth comes up with an alternative. There are murmurings of movement on the matter, in response to much disquiet and outright outrage, but nothing concrete has emerged yet. Will this be a climbdown (very unlikely – they’ve made their intentions clear) or more possibly provision of a lower cost alternative that retains the rights and privileges ensconced in the current provision? Don’t know yet, but it’s going to have to be competitive with the possible alternatives: a family Office365 account (ugh – GoDaddy domain registration required!), Zoho email, or my current favoured option – iCloud+ with the newish custom domain facility. The latter is looking very attractive if Google fails to make any move, given that the costs are already covered by my iCloud subscription.
BTW, Google will also lose my YouTube monthly subscription if they go ahead with this – it’s been nice, but no way will I continue to support a company that just drops such an important facility with so little recognition or planning, Do no evil, huh.
Is COVID vaccination freedom really worth it?
I’m wondering whether or not to post a brief run down of some statistics on the validity of COVID vaccination. Starting to get sick and tired of the deniers, the deliberately ignorant, the ‘freedom’ fighters. Just what freedoms are they on about? The freedom to get infected with a potentially deadly virus, the freedom to infect others, the freedom to damage society just so they can stick it to the man?
A few basic truths – vaccination helps by:
- reducing the chance of infection,
- reducing the severity of any breakthrough infections that might occur,
- and reducing the chance of passing it on to anyone else
If the vaccinated individual doesn’t get infected in the first place then they cannot pass it on at all, but that little snippet seems to get ignored too often.
In contrast, if you decline to be vaccinated by exercising your freedom that means that you:
- run a heightened risk of catching COVID,
- are more likely to become seriously ill,
- and are more likely, with an increased viral load, to pass on infection to someone else, with potentially deadly consequences.
Someone who does get ill and takes up an ICU bed may well be depriving a more deserving person, who didn’t have a choice regarding their ailment, that level of support, so that is doubly reprehensible.
What I see from those opposed to vaccination is a mishmash of pseudo scientific reports, often warped by agencies or individuals with little or no understanding of either the science or statistics behind the studies. When you try to show them the reality, they ignore that and switch to a different tangent. Eventually it usually ends up in name calling (I’ve had some seriously offensive stuff sent my way) and they either go off in a huff claiming we are all ‘sheeple’, or if it gets really heated they get banned from whatever forum we’re on. In no case has anyone ever been able to stand on their own two feet and say, with any credibility, that they have knowledge of the field and back up their arguments with real data.
In the meantime they continue to spread the misinformation, and sometimes downright lies, all in the service of some obsession with their rights. The latest call to emotion seems to be that armed forces fought for freedom and rights, so who are we to deny them? Now tell me, just where does the right to endanger others come from?
The site’s been up for only 24 hours and already attracted spam comments. Either my SEO power is awesome, or this was just a random drive-by hit. I suspect I know which is the more likely.